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Using dropdowns instead of radio buttons is a huge pet peeve of mine. Dropdowns are only appropriate if the quantity of choices is large and the user already k
by CarVac 6y ago
Using dropdowns instead of radio buttons is a huge pet peeve of mine.
Dropdowns are only appropriate if the quantity of choices is large and the user already knows what the choices are, and then you should be able to type your selection in. This would be things like birth year, country, and state/province.
Otherwise you add extra clicks, extra scrolling, and visual search of a brand-new element that can't be evaluated ahead of time.
- david422 6y agoI think you've summed it up nicely when dropdowns should be used vs buttons.
- weinzierl 6y ago> Dropdowns are only appropriate if the quantity of choices is large and the user already knows what the choices are, and then you should be able to type your selection in. Large, but not too large. You might think this is a silly objection and no one can get that one wrong but I actually have an example: I once worked for a company with a six digit number of employees and they introduced a new ticket system for company wide support. This was some years ago and also the transition from a dedicated desktop software to a browser based web UI. Someone had the idea to make the ticket number selection a drop down, which looked nice in testing and a few hours after production roll out, but the fun ended quickly - with thousands of tickets it was completely unusable within a day.
- CGamesPlay 6y agoConcur (an enterprise expense tracking app) used to require you enter the city of the expense you were tracking. It provided you with an alphabetical list of every city they knew about in a dropdown. Haven't used the software in the better part of a decade, so hopefully it's gotten better.
- kevincox 6y agoIt really bugs me when they use drop downs for numbers. We have a "number" type entry. Use that.
- arielserafini 6y agothere are issues with input type="number". https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-design-system-team-changed-the-input-type-for-numbers/ https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/24/why-the-gov-uk-des...
- vntok 6y agoNo, do not use that input type. Please have a deep read of sibling commenter's link. Its numerous flaws make input type=number completely inaccessible and therefore almost useless to the very kind of users who would normally benefit the most from simpler & more specialized inputs.
- klyrs 6y agoMobile interfaces are the worst. "Enter your birthday" but the year is a "dropdown list" that you need to scroll from 2021 all the way down to however old you are.